How to configure ChromeDriver to initiate Chrome browser in Headless mode through Selenium?

Maz picture Maz · Oct 24, 2017 · Viewed 104.1k times · Source

I'm working on a python script to web-scrape and have gone down the path of using Chromedriver as one of the packages. I would like this to operate in the background without any pop-up windows. I'm using the option 'headless' on chromedriver and it seems to do the job in terms of not showing the browser window, however, I still see the .exe file running. See the screenshot of what I'm talking about. Screenshot

This is the code I am using to initiate ChromeDriver:

options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
options.add_experimental_option("excludeSwitches",["ignore-certificate-errors"])
options.add_argument('headless')
options.add_argument('window-size=0x0')
chrome_driver_path = "C:\Python27\Scripts\chromedriver.exe"

Things I've tried to do is alter the window size in the options to 0x0 but I'm not sure that did anything as the .exe file still popped up.

Any ideas of how I can do this?

I am using Python 2.7 FYI

Answer

Daniel Porteous picture Daniel Porteous · Oct 25, 2017

It should look like this:

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options

options = Options()
options.add_argument('--headless')
options.add_argument('--disable-gpu')  # Last I checked this was necessary.
driver = webdriver.Chrome(CHROMEDRIVER_PATH, chrome_options=options)

This works for me using Python 3.6, I'm sure it'll work for 2.7 too.

Update 2018-10-26: These days you can just do this:

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options

options = Options()
options.headless = True
driver = webdriver.Chrome(CHROMEDRIVER_PATH, chrome_options=options)